Yeasayer, "Odd Blood

February 10, 2010

BY JIM DeROGATIS POP
MUSIC CRITIC

One of the slipperiest things
about great psychedelic rock
bands is that they're working in
a genre that rejects being
pigeonholed by any label.
"'Psychedelia' is such a broad
term," Yeasayer keyboardist and
vocalist Chris Keating told me
when I profiled the band in the
wake of its much-buzzed debut
"All Hour Cymbals" (2007). "I
hate the notion that the music
gets labeled and then all of the
sudden it's 1967 and
Haight-Ashbury, headbands and
tie-dye. I look at Public Enemy
as a pretty psychedelic
band--just the ideas behind
where they're coming from, and
sonically, the way they were
mixing their records and piecing
things together."

This is to
say that the only thing fans who
really understood the expansive
sounds of these
Baltimore-to-Brooklyn
transplants could reasonably
expect from their eagerly
anticipated second album was the
unexpected, and the quartet has
delivered with considerable
success.

Where the mixture of rock,
electronic and worldbeat rhythms
was the most obvious sonic
signature on the band's debut,
and those percolating
undercurrents still power much
of "Odd Blood," the vocals and a
new focus on pop songcraft are
what distinguish this disc, from
the rousing sing-along hook of
"Madder Red" (a standout in
concert when the band played
last year's Pitchfork Music
Festival) to the intimate vocal
delivery of the'80s-falvored
electronic ballad "I Remember."

Like many psychedelic
rockers, the members of Yeasayer
are optimistics, if not
utopians. "The world can be
an unfair place at times/But
your lows will have their
compliment of highs," they
sing on "Ambling Alp." The 10
tracks on "Odd Blood" pack
enough sugary hooks to keep you
high for a month, while the
sophisticated arrangements and
more mind-boggling than ever
polyrhythms firmly mark the band
as an equal to its neighbors and
fellow travelers TV on the Radio
and Animal Collective.